Who started the Russia-Georgia war?

Ask residents of this now battered Soviet-era provincial capital, you'll hear only one answer: Georgia.

Just hours after announcing a unilateral cease-fire on Aug. 7, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili ordered a massive artillery and armored assault aimed at restoring rebellious South Ossetia to Georgian rule.

"Thank God the Russians came in time," says Elena Khublova, who says she survived by hiding in a basement. "The Georgians were killing anybody who came into the street."

But new details contradict that version of events, according to a Russian investigative journalist. At the United Nations last week, Mr. Saakashvili also laid out a starkly different narrative, and pleaded for an impartial international investigation to gain "a clearer understanding of how this war started, and who started it."

Finding the answer is not merely an academic or historical exercise. Russian observers say the answer is critical to current global perceptions of a resurgent Russia. Is it a rational – if increasingly assertive – regional power protecting its flanks? Or is it reviving the international ambitions and military expansionism of the former USSR?

Much is also at stake for Saakashvili, who argued at the UN that "Georgia was attacked because it is a successful democracy," and who is asking the West to back his tiny Caucasus nation's drive to join NATO.

"In Georgian society, as well as around the world, exactly how the war started is the biggest question mark," says Archil Gegeshidze, an expert with the independent Foundation for Strategic and International Studies in Georgia's capital, Tbilisi. "We want to know whether this crisis was avoidable or not."

Was Georgia the aggressor?

The Kremlin insists that it intervened only to blunt the Georgian offensive and save South Ossetia's Russian-passport-carrying population under 1992 accords that designate Russia as the peacekeeper in the region. Most of the world accepts key elements of the Russian version, and very few contradict it.

South Ossetia, a Rhode Island-sized territory of about 70,000 people, declared independence from Georgia as the USSR was collapsing.

It defeated Georgian forces in 1992, and survived until last summer as a Russian protectorate with no chances of being recognized as an independent country, even by Moscow. Though the territory is Georgian under international law, Russian experts argue that Georgia's second attempt to seize it by force invalidate Tbilisi's claim.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev recognized the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia following the August war, and Russia is now constructing permanent military bases in both regions.

"Russia had been actively preparing for Georgian aggression for the past six months, because our intelligence services warned us that Saakashvili was preparing an attack" on South Ossetia or Abkhazia, says Andrei Klimov, deputy chair of the Russian State Duma's international affairs committee. Mr. Klimov has compiled a detailed timeline of events leading up to the war, that shows the Russian 58th Army entering South Ossetia on the afternoon of Aug. 8, nearly 20 hours after massed Georgian armor and artillery began bombarding Tskhinvali.

Or had Russia started invading first?

"When it happened, we were not as ready as we should have been, and Saakashvili had time to destroy Tskhinvali," Klimov says.

But Saakashvili's version, backed by at least one dissenting Russian military expert, is that he flung his forces into South Ossetia in an attempt to head off a significant Russian invasion already in progress.

Saakashvili has repeatedly insisted that Georgian intelligence identified huge numbers of Russian tanks and troops inside South Ossetia on Aug. 7, before Georgian forces assaulted Tskhinvali.

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